I was born and raised in Philadelphia, so when I travel I often get weird looks when I ask for a glass of wooder, and man do I miss good sawff pressle. Last week The New York Times published a great piece on the unique Philly sound:

No vowel escapes diphthongery, no hard consonant is safe from a mid-palate dent. Extra syllables pile up so as to avoid inconvenient tongue contact or mouth closure. If you forget to listen closely, the Philadelphia, or Filelfia, accent may sound like mumbled Mandarin without the tonal shifts.

That wonderful Philly accent that still says hewm to me is disappearing:

A recent study out of the University of Pennsylvania reported that, like many regional phenomena, the Philly sound is conforming more and more with the mainstream of Northern accents. […] Nowhere but in the Delaware Valley can you hear those rounded vowels — soda is sewda, house is hay-ouse — a clear influence from Baltimore and points south.